Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Feminist rabble rouser Amanda Marcotte has encouraged young
women to take naked selfies. It’s good clean fun, don’t you know.

Marcotte wrote:

It’s
the nude photo leak version of blaming a sexual assault victim for a short
skirt. It isn’t just that it shifts blame away from where it belongs, on the
perpetrators. It’s not just because it’s the typical misogynist tendency to
assume a woman is to blame for attacks on her. It’s because this attitude is
anti-creativity, anti-fun, anti-sex and, in many cases, anti-love.

According to a leading feminist, love is sending naked
pictures of yourself to … whomever.

By her lights, if anyone passes the pictures around in the
locker room, if you suffer humiliation, you can console yourself with the idea
that you are not to blame.

As though anyone ever believed such a thing. It is fair to mention
that attorneys defending rapists sometimes try to exculpate their clients by
saying that the woman’s attire was provocative, but you do better not to live
your life preparing to testify against someone who assaulted you.

As every mother knows and as every mother tells her
daughter, it is best to ensure that it not happen at all.

Marcotte, however, advises women to be reckless, irresponsible, incautious… because if anything bad happens to you, feminism will
console you by saying that it wasn’t your fault.

Marcotte exemplifies a mindless feminism in which older
feminists are willing to sacrifice, if not pimp out young women for the cause.

To counter this message, feminist firebrand and notable anti-prude Camille Paglia
has offered a few words of sage advice for young women.

Beginning her Time column with a reflection on Hannah Graham--
the University of Virginia student who vanished a couple of weeks ago and who
was presumably abducted, raped and murdered—Paglia responds that young people
have been coddled into thinking that sex is just good clean fun.

They have not learned that sex comports serious risks and dangers,
especially when you go out and have a drink with a stranger you met on the
street in the middle of the night.

No one is saying or thinking that Graham is responsible for
what happened to her, but it is worth pointing out that she seems to have
behaved recklessly. There is no consolation is knowing that she was not to
blame.

Paglia has no patience with the feminists who are railing
about the rape culture on college campus:

Wildly
overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are
obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or
iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite
hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus
incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape
(involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed
signals and imprudence on both sides.

Feminists who denounce the campus rape culture are failing
to inform young women of the dangers that exist off campus. And they are
lulling young women into believing that they can go where they want, when they
want, with whom they want… without fearing any consequences.

Apparently, people believe that if everyone keeps saying
that women are “strong” and “empowered” then women will become strong and
empowered. In fact, women who buy into the incantations become deluded about
their true strength and forget that they are vulnerable.

Paglia continues:

Too
many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect
adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But
the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is
personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

If it’s all a social construct, evil exists only within the
hearts and minds of those who belong to the ruling class. The oppressed of the
planet will behave well if only we feel sufficiently guilty for their
condition and show them sufficient empathy.

It’s reminds one of the Obama administration notion that if
we reach out to Muslims with an open hand of friendship, terrorism will
disappear. After all, terrorism is merely a just reaction to Western
oppression.

Paglia writes:

The
horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary
education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism —
toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and
remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as
great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and
light.

She adds:

Misled
by the naive optimism and “You go, girl!” boosterism of their upbringing, young
women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that
bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no
messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not
understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage
nature.

Young girls are told that they can do what they want, that
they can become whatever they want and that nothing can hold them back. They never
learn that their attire, for example, is sending messages and that these
messages might be misread by sociopaths. If Paglia is correct, many young women
do not even understand what it is to be a sociopath.

Clearly, a woman is not to blame if she is assaulted by a
sociopath, but how much of a consolation is that, really.

Today’s young intellectuals no longer believe in God.
Perhaps that is why, as Paglia suggests, they fail to grasp the reality of an evil that is not a social construct:

Liberalism
lacks a profound sense of evil — but so does conservatism these days, when evil
is facilely projected onto a foreign host of rising political forces united
only in their rejection of Western values. Nothing is more simplistic than the
now rote use by politicians and pundits of the cartoonish label “bad guys” for
jihadists, as if American foreign policy is a slapdash script for a cowboy
movie.

The
gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in
biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at
will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic
campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter
all men.

And today’s therapy culture, as I would call it, is not
doing any better.

In Paglia’s words:

But
today’s therapy has morphed into happy talk, attitude adjustments, and
pharmaceutical shortcuts.

Monday, September 29, 2014

When Newton discovered the laws of thermodynamics he did not
conclude that therefore God does not exist.

When Kepler wrote down the formula for planetary orbits he
did not continue to say that his work henceforth made it impossible to believe
in God.

And yet, when Darwin discovered evolution, his followers
insisted that you cannot accept the science and continue to believe in God.

Then, Darwin’s critics agreed: you cannot believe
in evolution and still believe in God.

It's nice to see a meeting of the minds.

Now, with atheism on the rise among the American
cognoscenti, a University of Washington biology professor David Barash gives
his students something he calls The Talk. In it he tells his students that they cannot believe in
evolution and believe in God at the same time.

You might wonder why a scientist would feel compelled to
burden his students with his opinions on metaphysics, to say nothing about
telling them what they can and cannot believe. You would be right to do so.

Barash tells his students:

… that,
although they don’t have to discard their religion in order to inform
themselves about biology (or even to pass my course), if they insist on
retaining and respecting both, they will have to undertake some challenging mental
gymnastic routines. And while I respect their beliefs, the entire point of The
Talk is to make clear that, at least for this biologist, it is no longer
acceptable for science to be the one doing those routines, as Professor Gould
and noma have insisted we do.

It is big of Barash to tell his undergraduate students that
they do not have to discard their religion. And yet, it’s only lip service. He
continues to say that you cannot believe in science and believe in God at the
same time.

And yet, since God cannot be measured or tested, it makes no
sense to suggest that you can prove or disprove God’s existence scientifically.
Perhaps he wants to recruit people to the atheist cause, but what makes Barash an
authority on metaphysics?

Barash disparages the late Stephen Jay Gould, but Gould was
closer to the truth. Following David Hume, Gould argued that religion set moral
values and that science described reality.

Religion is about what you should or should not do. Science
is about what is.

Moreover, why should we not believe that God created human
beings through the process of evolution?

Barash summarizes the now commonly held view:

According
to this expansive view, God might well have used evolution by natural selection
to produce his creation.

This is
undeniable. If God exists, then he could have employed anything under the sun —
or beyond it — to work his will. Hence, there is nothing in evolutionary
biology that necessarily precludes religion, save for most religious
fundamentalisms (everything that we know about biology and geology proclaims
that the Earth was not made in a day).

In order to refute this argument Barash introduces what I
would call a straw God. Anyone who believes in God believes, he says, that God
is omnipresent and omni-benevolent. How can a benevolent deity, he says, have
allowed so much suffering in the world.

Of course, the same deity has allowed much joy in the world,
and no serious theologian has ever held that God is obliged to eliminate all
suffering.

Finally, Barash arrives at his conclusion:

The
more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living
things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral
process, with no indication of a benevolent, controlling creator.

One might also say that the universe and the humans who
inhabit a tiny part of it are involved in an orderly, not a disorderly process
and that this process is intelligible.

As Jacques Lacan once opined, if the planets were following
Kepler’s law before Kepler discovered it, and if the law is an idea, where did
that idea exist before Kepler wrote it down?If it existed, was any mind
thinking it?

In a sense Barash has proved Hume’s point. If you want
science to be the gold standard you must eliminate morality. In an amoral
universe there is no reason to follow the precept of benevolence. One might say
that, in such a universe, cruelty is the order of the day.

It should be noted that not all religions are the same. Not
all of them place divine or even parental benevolence at the center of their
moral universe.

But if follow Barash's version of science, how can we avoid the conclusion that human beings, if they want
to live in harmony with an amoral natural world should act as though there are
no rules? Amorality means that there are no rules. Immorality means that there
are rules, but that you break them.

[I will note that I discussed the socio-cultural
implications of amorality in my book The
Last Psychoanalyst. There I also explained the importance of the principle
of benevolence, as articulated in Judeo-Christian tradition.]

It’s well and good to debate metaphysical questions, but in
the case at hand we can also ask what happens when these different principles
are put into human practice. What if you create a perfectly amoral culture, one
that rejects the practice of benevolence?

Can we not judge that culture by what it does and does not
produce? Regardless of whether religion is going to show you the way to
Paradise, it also produces cultures and communities. We are within our rights
to ask whether these cultures provide a good life for its people.

In other words, we may judge religious values on pragmatic
grounds. How well do they work, how much social harmony do they produce when
they are practiced by a culture?

And we know, Judeo-Christian values have produced both good
and bad.

And yet, what has atheism done for anyone lately? We are within our rights to examine the track record of atheist cultures, the ones that follow the
principles of a supposedly scientific amorality and that reject benevolence. I
am, of course, thinking of totalitarian Communism.

Judeo-Christianity has produced both good and bad. Atheistic
cultures, such as they are, have produced nothing good, nothing of real value. They have merely succeeded in destroying millions of human lives in a very short
period of time.

Barash has shown that when you make science omnipotent, you
do what Hume thought you would do: you eliminate morality and produce
a purely amoral culture.

It is fair to say that many atheists would disagree, but
Barash’s view should still be taken seriously.

Some scientists would say that science should not be judged
by the results of putting atheism into cultural practice. They would say that science
is not in the business of producing communities.

This is true enough. And yet, if science is to rule our
lives; if it is going to hold itself up as a higher authority, doesn’t it need
to find a way to bring social beings together in community?

If science merely wants to destroy the attachment people
have to their religious congregations, ought it not to be responsible for the
ensuing anomie?

Of course, there’s more to social life than attending
religious services. And yet, religion seems to function universally as a
mechanism for producing social cohesion. The truth is, you cannot have social cohesion
without moral principles. You cannot have a community unless everyone is
following the same rules. Where these rules come from and why people are
inclined to follow them, we might leave open. And yet, we do know that they
have not been handed down by science.

Islamists are proud of the fact that they lack such delicate
sensitivities. And they believe that, being more brutal, they are stronger.

Goldman explained:

Since
9/11 I have argued that the strategic plan of Islamist terrorism is to poison
the Western soul with horror, by setting in motion atrocities too grim for the
Western mind to bear….

At some point, the Western mind will say that it is easier
to reconcile with these forces than to fight them. Since they know no fear,
they become, in Western eyes, an invincible warrior.

Goldman is also at pains to point out, as he did in 2001
that today’s Islamist terrorist has more in common with yesterday’s Nazis than
he does with yesterday’s Muslim conquerors:

This is
not simply the brutality of the pagan world employed by the Romans with their
mass crucifixions as much as it was by Muslim conquerors of the Middle Ages: it
is a refined and exquisite sense of horror learned by modern Muslims from the
Nazis, whose example inspired the Muslim Brotherhood as well as the Ba’ath
Party. Strictly speaking, the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing more than the
Arab-language wing of National Socialism, and movements like ISIS a more
radical version of the same thing, something like Ernst Roehm’s Sturmabteilung.

We have
seen this throughout, and most recently in Gaza, where Hamas used every means
possible to maximize its own civilian casualties in order to horrify the world.
Whatever the circumstances, one should not rejoice in the death of civilians,
but it is necessary to harden our hearts against an enemy who detects weakness
in our delicate sense of humanity.

In October of 2001, in the shadow of 9/11, Goldman expressed
the same thought:

The
West confronts not a throwback to medieval Islam, but a Westernized version of
Islam transformed into a totalitarian political ideology. Although it draws
upon Islamic sources and overlaps with some strains of Muslim belief, the
ideology of Al-Qaeda has greater kinship with Nazism, another synthetic pagan
religion, than with traditional Islam.

Like National Socialists, Islamists are driven by ideology.
In particular they are enacting an ideology of destruction for the sake of
destruction. Whether their motives are purely sadistic, as Goldman suggests, I
will leave to others to decide.

As it happens, destruction for the sake of destruction
reminds us of the agenda of the critical reading method called deconstruction.
Of course, practitioners of deconstruction tend to limit themselves to texts,
but the progenitor of this movement was a Nazi philosopher named Martin
Heidegger. The French and English term deconstruction derives from Heidegger’s
concept of Destruktion. Keep in mind,
Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in Germany at time when the Storm Troopers of
Ernst Rohm were beginning their pogroms against German Jews.

Goldman explained the difference between today’s Islamist
terrorists and past Islamist conquerors. Being purely amoral Islamist
terrorists have gotten beyond good and evil, to the point where they can show
off their power, not by building anything, not by uniting peoples, not by
creating community, but by destroying same.

In his words:

No
traditional society destroyed for the pleasure of destruction; at least none of
which we have had reports. The Islamic conquerors of the past raided for
identifiable goals. They wished to rule new territories and bring new peoples
under their sway. Whether greed or missionary zeal drove them on, let
historians argue.

Al-Qaeda
wants no territory, no conversions, no loot, no slaves. It wishes to destroy
the West and happily will sacrifice millions of Muslim lives in order to do so.

Evil
for its own sake becomes imaginable only when the Christian civilization of the
West abandons Christianity and stares into the abyss of its own destruction.

Of course, Islamists do want the West to submit to Allah. They
want to impose Shariah law on everyone. Their goal would seem to be the triumph
of their faith… and yet, if Goldman is correct, and if the project is as
nihilistic as he makes it out to be, Muslim civilization is dying out and
believes that it can only save face by making the West’s victory Pyrrhic.

After all, if Islam conquered the West, it would have to
produce. It would have to show that it could produce peace and prosperity.
Thus, it makes more sense that it wants more to destroy than to conquer.

It feels like a bit of a rant, but apparently Bret Easton Ellis has earned the right to critique the younger, Millennial generation.

Even if you don’t like his judgments—and his point is that
Millennials do not like and cannot handle any negative judgment of their worth—his
writing is still worth reading.

In effect, Ellis describes what happens to children when
they are brought up to have high self-esteem, regardless of their
accomplishments. People who have chosen to follow the dictates of the therapy culture have apparently done damage to their children.

Ellis has been here before, and has been attacked for
generalizing. He offers this portrait of what he calls Generation Wuss:

My huge
generalities touch on their over-sensitivity, their insistence that they are
right despite the overwhelming proof that suggests they are not, their lack of
placing things within context, the overreacting, the passive-aggressive
positivity, and, of course, all of this exacerbated by the meds they’ve been
fed since childhood by over-protective “helicopter” parents mapping their every
move. These are late-end Baby Boomers and Generation X parents who were now
rebelling against their own rebelliousness because of the love they felt that
they never got from their selfish narcissistic Boomer parents and who end up
smothering their kids, inducing a kind of inadequate preparation in how to deal
with the hardships of life and the real way the world works: people won’t like
you, that person may not love you back, kids are really cruel, work sucks, it’s
hard to be good at something, life is made up of failure and disappointment,
you’re not talented, people suffer, people grow old, people die. And Generation
Wuss responds by collapsing into sentimentality and creating victim narratives
rather than acknowledging the realities of the world and grappling with them
and processing them and then moving on, better prepared to navigate an often
hostile or indifferent world that doesn’t care if you exist.

When Ellis first offered his views of Generation Wuss, he
was deluged with stories that proved his point:

… a father
related a story how he remembered watching in frustration as his son
participated in a tug-of-war game with his classmates on the field of his
elementary school and after a minute or two the well-meaning coach announced
the game was officially a tie, told the kids they did a great job, and everyone
got a ribbon. Occasionally there were darker stories: guilt-ridden parents
chastising themselves for coddling kids who when finally faced with the normal
reality of the world drifted into drugs as an escape…from the normal reality of
the world. Parents kept reaching out and told me they were tormented by this
oppressive need to reward their kids constantly in this culture. That in doing
so they effectively debilitated them from dealing with the failures we all
confront as get older, and that their children were unequipped to deal with
pain.

Unable to deal with failure, unequipped to deal with pain.
Instead of changing their ways, they believe that negative emotions have
nothing to do with their actions in the world and do not require them to do
things differently. They have learned that negative emotions are merely a
chemical imbalance that needs to be regulated through the consumption of
psychoactive medication.

It’s not just that the climate is getting warmer—or not.
Those who believe in the “settled science” of climate change believe that
variations in climate are being caused by human activity.

Had they said that activity on the sun or some other
naturally occurring phenomenon was causing the planet to warm up or cool down,
it would have been one thing. Their assertion, however, is and has been that
the activity of human beings, especially the burning of fossil fuels is
directly causing the change.

If the latter is the case, then human beings are
guilty-as-sin and must immediately repent and change their wicked ways. They
must now curtail their use of fossil fuels, the better to save the planet. This
is, at the very least, empowering. It says that human beings, by casting off
their plastic shopping bags, can impact the earth’s future climate. Who would not feel flattered?

In the meantime, the New York Times reports a recent study
that seems to debunk the second of the tenets of global warmism. This
scientific study, published in a peer-reviewed journal, explains that certain
changes in the weather patterns in the American northwest state have nothing to
do with fossil fuels. They occur because
of something that is happening naturally within the ocean.

The Times explains:

A new
and most likely controversial analysis
of Pacific Ocean weather patterns concludes that a century-long trend of
rising temperatures in the American Northwest is largely explained by natural
shifts in ocean winds, not by human activity.

The
analysis, published on Monday in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, effectively suggests that the
region has warmed because ocean winds, on average, have weakened and shifted
direction.

Scientists
have long known that sea surface temperatures are lower when strong winds whip
up ocean waves, and higher when the seas are calm. Researchers generally have
assumed that the phenomenon was but one factor in that warming, and that
increased levels of carbon dioxide from human activity play a major role in
driving rising temperatures.

But the
new analysis, which relies on wind, barometric pressure and temperature data
recorded from 1900 to 2012, concludes that human activity has little impact.

“The
concept of winds controlling or affecting ocean temperature in that very way is
not controversial, but the strength of that relationship was quite amazing” in
the northwestern Pacific, said James Johnstone, a climatologist and the study’s
lead author. “It explains practically every wiggle in the ocean temperature
variations. It’s a phenomenal correlation.”

As for the influence of rising levels of carbon dioxide, the
Times explains:

The
study cast doubt on the possibility that the wind changes were themselves
caused by rising carbon-dioxide levels, noting that simulations employing the
latest climate-change computer models found no such link, and that temperatures
rose most sharply when carbon dioxide levels were lower.

Saturday, September 27, 2014

The University of Michigan wants us to know more about abuse,
especially sexual abuse. It wants us to be aware of it, to be conscious of its
many faces and facets.

As happens with all lists of sins, it’s all about what not
to do. It requires you to cultivate your internal policing mechanism, the
better to control any tendency that UMich considers to be abusive.

You might think that Freud is dead or outmoded, but the
psychology behind this listification is
recycled Freud. It implies a conflict between an unruly criminal id and an ego
that tries to control it. It lends itself well to the addition of a superego
that punishes transgressions.

The list tells you what you should not do. It does not tell
anyone what to do to best conduct a relationship. It does not tell you how to
get along.

Worse yet, it makes the university and the government into
moral scolds, not merely protecting people from abuse—an admirable goal—but intruding
into everyone’s more intimate relationships.

If the advent of the hookup culture created the impression
that anything goes, the reaction is creating the impression that nothing goes.

When it comes to sexual violence, UMich outdoes itself. In
many cases the imprecise wording lends itself easily to misinterpretation:

Examples
of sexual violence include: discounting the partner's feelings regarding sex;
criticizing the partner sexually; touching the partner sexually in
inappropriate and uncomfortable ways; withholding sex and affection; always
demanding sex; forcing partner to strip as a form of humiliation (maybe in
front of children), to witness sexual acts, to participate in uncomfortable sex
or sex after an episode of violence, to have sex with other people; and using
objects and/or weapons to hurt during sex or threats to back up demands for
sex.

What is going on here? Let us count the ways.

What does it mean to “discount” partner’s feelings about
sex? I assume it means ignoring them. I assume it means pressing partner for sex when
partner does not want to have sex.

Yet, the term is so vague that it could mean almost
anything. If partner wants to engage in one specific sex act and you do not
want to do it, does that mean that you are failing to accept partner’s feelings
about sex?

What does it mean to criticize the partner sexually? I
assume that it has something to do with complaining about poor performance or
about too much or too little sex. It sounds like a good precept, but still… do
really need to put ourselves on the path to criminalizing such behavior? Let’s
not overlook the fact that many people will argue that if you never tell
partner what he or she is doing wrong he or she will never improve his or her
sexual performance.

One understands that hitting and beating someone is abusive,
but what about inappropriate touching? Sometimes you have to try it before you
can know whether it is appropriate or uncomfortable or unwanted. Does this mean
that you need to ask permission? And what happens if you receive written
permission to touch her in this or that place, but then when you do it she finds it uncomfortable? Does your agreement absolve you of
sin?

In all seriousness, how many adolescent males have never
tried to touch a girl inappropriately? Aren’t we moving toward criminalizing
normal adolescent behavior?

Obviously, if a man walks up to a woman and grabs her—anywhere—he
has committed an assault… which is surely an act of sexual violence.

What about withholding sex and affection? How do you know
whether your partner is withholding sex or is just not interested? There are a
myriad of reasons why someone might not want to have sex. Do we need to declare
such behavior to be abusive?

What if he has behaved so badly that she does not feel very
close or very libidinous? What if his behavior has nothing to do with her; it
might have been something he did to a third party.

Should she be taxed
with withholding sex? And then, how often does a couple need to have sex before
neither one can be said to be withholding sex? If withholding sex is abusive, should
a partner feel obliged to have sex when he or she does not really want to, lest
he or she be accused of withholding sex?

As for withholding affection, how do you measure it? How can
you tell? Is a man going to be accused of withholding affection if he does not
say “I love you” often enough? Will he be brought up on charges of abuse for
not showing sufficient empathy? Do you think it is healthy to indict people for
not being sufficiently affectionate? Who decides the right and the wrong
quantity of affection?

One understands that it is offensive when one partner always demands sex, but, then again,
does this imply that it’s OK to demand sex sometimes. Besides, who demands sex
anyway? Isn’t it a turnoff to demand sex?

And, what about forcing one’s partner to strip naked in
front of the children? Who thinks of these things? If people want to imagine
perverse scenarios, it’s their constitutional right. But, whatever makes them
imaginie that they need to share them with the general public?

And, why give people ideas for new ways to humiliate their
partners?

As for the sexual violence inherent in what is called
witnessing sex acts, does that mean that making pornography part of your erotic
interlude is now considered to be verboten? What if you are watching a tape of the
sex act that you and your partner performed? Does that count as witnessing
sexual acts?

Or does it only apply to peep shows?

What about the injunction against having sex with other
people? Does this spell the end of threesomes, of foursomes or polyamory? I had
thought that the next frontier in the sexual revolution involved multiple
partners. Did I miss something?

Perhaps, the Michigan scolds are just saying that thou shalt
not commit adultery. Is this news? Is adultery now going to be re-criminalized?

As for the use of objects or weapons to hurt, one is
inclined to sympathize with the need to mention it. As it happens, some
sexually advanced couples like to use objects and weapons to hurt each other
because they find that it’s the best way to achieve higher levels of
satisfaction. Are we going to criminalize sado-masochism… all the while
accusing those who have a more traditional attitude toward sexuality of being
repressed prudes.?

You might imagine that it’s alright if the abusive and
violent actions are performed by consenting adults. Perhaps if they draw up a
contract stipulating what forms of pain are acceptable and what forms are not.

This sounds like a very modern idea, but the classical
manual for masochism, Leopold von Sacher Masoch’s Venus in Furs prescribes this kind of contract to better enhance a
sado-masochistic relationship.

The most fascinating part of this exercise is that a group
of people that presumably favored the free and open expression of sexuality has
become a bunch of ordinary scolds. They might believe that they are fighting
against sexual repression, but they have become a sexually repressive force.

You might believe
that, given the influence of the hookup culture and given the fact that college
students are indulging in all manner of sexual abuse—at times intentionally, at
times out of ignorance—that someone had to do something. Still, criminalizing
most sexual behavior is merely going to introduce a new form of mental
conflict, between forces that want to do perverse things and agencies that are
trying desperately to control them. If that is the conflict, and the dialectic,
and if that is all there is to sexual relationships, then it’s inevitable that
the forces of abuse will at some point break free from their chains.

A question for today. Which country has the most bureaucrats and functionaries, per capita: the United States or Communist China? And
how do they all rate next to great European democracies like France and
Germany?

…the
size of the Chinese government and party bureaucracy is surprisingly modest…In
this respect, the Chinese communist Party is similar to previous Chinese
dynasties as far back as the Han, which ruled the vast Chinese empire with a
modestly sized civil service.

…China
has only 31 government and party employees per thousand residents. The
number of civil servants per thousand residents in France is 95, in the United
States, 75, and in Germany 53.

Cowen wants us to note that this number does not include
state-owned enterprises. He says that they are significant, but shrinking in
size.

We should also note that the number from China also includes
employees of the Communist Party. Numbers from democratic Western nations do
not include party members.

So, anytime asks you which nation has the most bureaucrats,
you will know that France, the United States and Germany have far more per capita than Communist China.

Friday, September 26, 2014

Hillary Clinton’s most recent trip to Iowa allowed her, yet again, to be overshadowed by her husband.

In The Economist, Lexington mused about Mr. Clinton’s
ability to define an issue:

Mrs
Clinton’s husband has a talent for defining the political issue of the moment,
and proved it again at the steak fry. America faces a puzzling problem, he
mused in his speech. “We are less racist, sexist and homophobic than we’ve ever
been.” At the same time: “We don’t want to be around anyone who disagrees with
us.” Put another way, even as some big divisive arguments lose their potency,
partisan divisions are growing ever sharper.

Bill Clinton is well suited to the job. After all, he is a
leader in a Democratic Party that has done everything in its power to raise
everyone’s consciousness of racism, sexism and homophobia. The same party,
through its friends in the media and the school system has used the thought police to repress all expressions of politically incorrect
thought.

The Democratic Party owes its electoral success to its
ability to demonize the opposition. Surely, Bill Clinton was not the worst at
this. The current president is. But between raising the threat of racism and denouncing
the Republican War on Women, Democrats have much to answer for.

Everyone knows that it is impermissible to express politically incorrect thoughts. And not just in public. If you say the wrong
thing in private and if your words are picked up on someone’s recording device,
you can be in extremely serious trouble.

This means that citizens of the Republic are no longer
honorable people who might have differences of opinion. Failure to toe the
politically correct party line will cause others to demonize you, to shun you, to expel you from
polite society.

Surely, it involves demonizing the opposition, and, sad to
say, today’s Democratic Party has mastered the art. Look at how well it
succeeded in demonizing Mitt Romney and in shutting down all criticism of BHO.

This does not necessarily mean that racist, sexist and
homophobic thoughts and feelings have vanished from everyone’s consciousness. It
means that everyone knows better than to express them in public. Or better, to
express them around people who are not known to be like-minded.

We are all living under a threat. It’s not sufficient just
to shut up about certain matters. You should not even risk being associated
with anyone who thinks differently. If an errant turn of phrase can ruin your
life you are likely to be ever-so-careful in choosing your friends.

It’s alright to associate with Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers
and Father Pfleger… but there will be hell to pay if you are caught socializing
with Paula Dean.

Perhaps it is necessary to tyrannize minds. Perhaps it's what you do when persuasion fails. Two decades ago
no one had heard of same-sex marriage. No one had really even thought of it.
Now, if you do express your wholehearted support for it, you will be
denounced as a near-Nazi.

It used to be the case that gays reveled in the fact that
they were not just like everyone else. They were proud to be different. Now, if
you do not believe that same-sex and opposite sex marriage are the same thing
you will be treated like a pariah.

On this among other issues democratic deliberation no longer
exists.

Moreover, teaching people what not to say is not the same as teaching them how to get along with each other.
Nothing about the assault on politically incorrect speech tells you how to get
along with anyone else.

Multiculturalism militates against getting along. If
everyone is speaking a different language, practicing different customs and following different dress codes, the chances
for getting along, for connecting are extremely limited.

Bill Clinton notwithstanding, the Democratic Party trots out
the specters of racism, sexism and homophobia to rev up its base and to win
elections. One would like to see Bill Clinton lead the charge against it, but
one doubts that that will ever happen.

Filkens covered Iraq, among other things, for The New York
Times. Now he does the same at The New Yorker. He has been a critic of the Iraq
War, but has reported honestly and objectively about the situation in that country.

The last line should not be news. Yet, the Obama
administration continues to harp on the notion that the Iraqis made it
impossible for us to stay, thus to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement.

Here is Filkins’ description of the results of President
Obama’s withdrawal policy. He told Hewitt:

We left, the United States left in 2011. We went
to zero, and we left. I mean, we packed up and left. So when you drive around
Baghdad now, there is not a trace that the United States was ever there, and I
mean apart from the American weapons, but in terms of like American presence
and projects and guidance, gone. And I think that we spent almost a decade
there. We paid with a lot of lives and a lot of blood, and building,
essentially, rebuilding the Iraqi state that we destroyed. And I don’t think it
was ready. I mean, it just wasn’t ready to function on its own. And it couldn’t
function without us. And actually, Ambassador Crocker, who was on your show,
had a really good description of it. He said you know, we build ourselves into
the hard drive of the place, and so we, the United States, were the honest
broker. We were the only people that could sort of bring all the Iraqi factions
together, and then we left. You know, and so the thing doesn’t work without us.
And you can see that in Iraq at a micro level, like when I talked to that
deserter, who said as soon as the Americans left, the commanders started
stealing all the money and everybody left, and everything fell apart. Or you
can see it at the macro level. I mean, that’s what’s happened to the Iraqi
state.

As we watch clips of our
president announcing with great pride how happy he was to leave Iraq, it’s good
to keep in mind the consequences of his cut-and-run policy.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

For those who believe that government bureaucrats should
control our lives behavioral economics has been a boon.

One of its eminences, Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein even
worked in the Obama White House. There, he was trying to modernize the
principles of government regulation. One must mention that the Obama administration has issued a veritable of business-crushing regulations. It has proven to be a champion at the game.

Along with economist Richard Thaler, Sunstein developed the
concept of the nudge. Government would not force people to what was in their
best interest. It would nudge them in the right direction. No more compulsion;
just a little paternalistic push toward the good.

Of course, this assumes that other people know better than
you what is good for you.

As many people noted at the time—among them Thomas Sowell—nothing
about the theory obviates the fact that regulators might have a
less-than-perfect understanding of what is best for all citizens. They, like
the rest of us, are human beings, subject to error.

Great thinkers like Sunstein believe that bureaucrats can
make more objective judgments because they are not corrupted by the profit
motive. They possess more virtue because their intentions are less venal.

One would be correct to see creeping socialism in this bit
of sophistry. Were we to respond to it, we would say that, lacking a profit
motive, government officials need not heed the judgment of the marketplace and have no real interest in whether their nudging works.

Who is going to regulate the regulators?

You might respond that our elected representatives should be
charged with the task, but we all know that government employees belong to
unions and that the unions are in the business of buying politicians.

In any event, the objections against nudging are not only
coming from libertarian and conservative circles. Recently, the New York Review
of Books published a review of two books by Sunstein. The author, NYU and
Oxford Professor Jeremy Waldron critiques the concept from a more classically
liberal perspective.

Waldron’s review is excellent and well worth your attention.
By the time he is finished there is very little about Sunstein’s nudgery that
is still standing.

Waldron begins by noting that Sunstein has divided people
into two classes: ordinary people who don’t know and those who do know. Plato
would have called the latter group a guardian class, people who have privileged
access to the world of big ideas and who therefore have the right to make
decisions for the first group.

In Waldron’s words:

Let’s
think about the dramatis personae of Sunstein’s account. There are, first of
all, people, ordinary individuals with their heuristics, their intuitions, and
their rules of thumb, with their laziness, their impulses, and their myopia.
They have choices to make for themselves and their loved ones, and they make
some of them well and many of them badly.

Then
there are those whom Sunstein refers to as “we.” We know this, we
know that, and we know
better about the way ordinary people make their choices. We are the law professors and
the behavioral economists who (a) understand human choosing and its foibles
much better than members of the first group and (b) are in a position to design
and manipulate the architecture of the choices that face ordinary folk. In
other words, the members of this second group are endowed with a happy
combination of power and expertise.

Of
course regulators are people too. And like the rest of us, they are fallible.
In the original Nudge,
Sunstein engagingly confessed to many of the decisional foibles that Thaler
exposed. Worse, though, is the fact that regulators are apt to make mistakes in
their regulatory behavior: “For every bias identified for individuals, there is
an accompanying bias in the public sphere.”

Continuing, Waldron raises the important issue of trust. If
everyone is trying to nudge us in one way or another, why would we not become a
nation of cynics? Are we being trained in the habit of mistrust?

In his words:

I am
afraid there is very little awareness in these books about the problem of
trust. Every day we are bombarded with offers whose choice architecture is
manipulated, not necessarily in our favor. The latest deal from the phone
company is designed to bamboozle us, and we may well want such blandishments
regulated. But it is not clear whether the regulators themselves are
trustworthy. Governments don’t just make mistakes; they sometimes set out
deliberately to mislead us. The mendacity of elected officials is legendary and
claims on our trust and credulity have often been squandered. It is against
this background that we have to consider how nudging might be abused.

And then there are the questions of dignity and free will.
It is certainly important that those who want to use behavioral economics to
nudge us in one direction or other have no real use for free will.

What happens when we are no longer accorded the option of
making a mistake, even of learning from a mistake?

Waldron writes:

Deeper
even than this is a prickly concern about dignity. What becomes of the
self-respect we invest in our own willed actions, flawed and misguided though
they often are, when so many of our choices are manipulated to promote what
someone else sees (perhaps rightly) as our best interest? Sunstein is well
aware that many will see the rigging of choice through nudges as an affront to
human dignity: I mean dignity in the sense of self-respect, an individual’s
awareness of her own worth as a chooser. The term “dignity” did not appear in
the book he wrote with Thaler, but in Why Nudge? Sunstein concedes that this objection is
“intensely felt.” Practically everything he says about it, however, is an
attempt to brush dignity aside.

He also suggests that nudging does not provide a moral
education. It does not teach us how to make better decisions or how to correct
our bad decisions:

Consider
the earlier point about heuristics—the rules for behavior that we habitually
follow. Nudging doesn’t teach me not to use inappropriate heuristics or to
abandon irrational intuitions or outdated rules of thumb. It does not try to
educate my choosing, for maybe I am unteachable. Instead it builds on my
foibles. It manipulates my sense of the situation so that some heuristic—for
example, a lazy feeling that I don’t need to think about saving for
retirement—which is in principle inappropriate for the choice that I face, will
still, thanks to a nudge, yield the answer that rational reflection would
yield. Instead of teaching me to think actively about retirement, it takes
advantage of my inertia. Instead of teaching me not to automatically choose the
first item on the menu, it moves the objectively desirable items up to first
place.

In the end, what Waldron calls a “nudge-world” deprives us
of free will and human dignity… and it presumably does so for our own good. It is
all about manipulating other people. How long can we expect that that will
last?

He explains:

Still,
it is another matter whether we should be so happy with what I have called
“nudge-world.” In that world almost every decision is manipulated in this way.
Choice architects nudge almost everything I choose and do, and this is
complemented by the independent activity of marketers and salesmen, who nudge
away furiously for their own benefit. I’m not sure I want to live in
nudge-world, though—as a notoriously poor chooser—I appreciate the good-hearted
and intelligent efforts of choice architects such as Sunstein to make my
autonomous life a little bit better. I wish, though, that I could be made a
better chooser rather than having someone on high take advantage (even for my
own benefit) of my current thoughtlessness and my shabby intuitions.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Some psychiatrists think that mental illness is all about
brain chemistry and that a little of this and a little that will make all your
troubles go away.

And yet, how much do we really know about the long-term
effects of taking these miracle drugs? And how much do we know about taking them in combination?

Apparently, not as much as we should. Since many of them
have not been around for a very long time, our knowledge is perforce limited.

Recently, newspapers have been reporting on research
suggesting that benzodiapines and other anti-anxiety and sedative drugs might,
when taken in excess, produce dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Benzodiapines include Valium and Klonopin, among other
drugs.

One recalls that, for quite some time, psychiatrists did not
know that Valium was addictive.

Those who defend the drugs suggest that it’s about
correlation, not causation. People who are anxious and suffer from insomnia are
more likely to get dementia, and thus, are more likely to use these
medications.

The latest studies, however, suggest that it’s more about
causation than correlation.

“The
more the cumulative days of use, the higher the risk of later being diagnosed
with dementia,” Dr. Antoine Pariente, a pharmacoepidemiologist at the
University of Bordeaux and a co-author of the study, told me in an interview.

He and
his colleagues reviewed medical records of almost 1,800 older people diagnosed
with Alzheimer’s in the public health insurance program in Quebec, and compared
them with nearly 7,200 control subjects. Most were over age 80.

About
half those with Alzheimer’s and 40 percent of the control subjects had used
benzodiazepines, the researchers found. That translated to a 51 percent
increase in the odds of a subsequent Alzheimer’s diagnosis among the
benzodiazepine users.

It was
not short-term use that drove that finding: Older people who took prescribed
doses for 90 days or fewer over the course of the study — patients were
followed for six years or longer — had no increased risk.

But
those who took the drugs longer were more likely to be diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s. In older patients who took daily doses for 91 to 180 days, the
risk rose 32 percent, compared to those who took none. In those who took daily
doses for more than 180 days, the risk was 84 percent higher.

Let’s say that it is not yet settled science. But still, the
scientists who have performed and examined these studies recommend that those
who continue to take these medications be informed of the risks.